Gold is the element most closely associated with the sun. This connection has been alchemical, visual and metaphorical: The sun as that which produces power, gold it’s symbol. The relationship between photography and gold can be traced to the medium’s roots, in the 1840’s it was used as an alternative to silver as a sensitizing agent. Oppenheim refers to this technique in Heliograms.

An image of the sun from July 8th, 1876 is exposed at different times of day to sunlight, starting at dawn and continuing through dusk, beginning with the vernal equinox and extending through the following months. The intensity and quality of light between hours and between days changes sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. There are times of the day when the artist cannot make an exposure, times when life gets in the way. These moments appear as blank spaces on the wall, making physical a fractured temporal experience. Each wall represents the months in which the work was produced, March, April and May 2011. Through the installation of the photograms, Oppenheim thinks about how the physicality of the exhibition space can stand in for these temporal moments, much like the grid of days on a calendar.

If much time has passed between a frozen image of the sun in 1876 and Oppenheim's new prints, time runs through the duration of her project. As a picture fades, materially and in memory, it takes on the additional meaning of all the moments between when it was created and when it is viewed or remembered. In Heliograms, Oppenheim points towards these invisible histories by exposing a 19th century photograph of the sun to sunlight over and over again, as if through repetition something ...

Global .Wav is a "weekly presentation by Fatima Al Qadiri of attention-worthy music videos from around the world." Among recent findings, a Tanzanian heartthrob, a "tween trance act from Iran," a Kazakh boy band, a Moroccan pop singer Snooki doppelganger and a "super-hot" Mongolian rapper ("all the machinations of an obvious gangsta rap video: a cage containing an agitated (jailed?) homeboy, gang signs/tattoos, appropriated hood styling via bandana and XXXX-L tees, etc. On closer inspection, however, the beat and the melody are actually sick.")

Unfortunately, more often than not this looked terrible, because the artist simply drew the scene once, picked some colors to be animated and set them to cycle. While this technically qualified as "color cycling", it looked more like a bad acid trip. For an example, just look at the water in this game.

However, there was one graphic artist who took the technique to a whole new level, and produced absolutely breathtaking color cycling scenes. Mark J. Ferrari, who also illustrated all the original backgrounds for LucasArts Loom, and some for The Secret of Monkey Island, invented his own unique ways of using color cycling for envrironmental effects that you really have to see to believe. These include rain, snow, ocean waves, moving fog, clouds, smoke, waterfalls, streams, lakes, and more. And all these effects are achieved without any layers or alpha channels -- just one single flat image with one 256 color palette.

Unfortunately the art of color cycling died out in the late 90s, giving way to newer technologies like 3D rendering and full 32-bit "true color" games. However, 2D pixel graphics of old are making a comeback in recent years, with mobile devices and web games. I thought now would be the time to reintroduce color cycling, using open web technologies like the HTML5 Canvas element.
This demo is an implementation of a full 8-bit color cycling engine, rendered into an HTML5 Canvas in real-time. I am using 35 of Mark's original 640x480 pixel masterpieces which you can explore, and I added some ambient environmental soundtracks to match. Please enjoy, and the source code is free for you to use in your own projects

How does skeumorphism relate to the ideas of post- and trans-humanism? Do you think our bodies will once become skeumorphs?

Certainly Stelarc does! And Orlan, the French performance artist who has plastic surgery under local anaesthetic, suggests that we're already skeuomorphic.

Is the human appendix a skeuomorph?

Already so many parts of our bodies aren't biologically necessary. Yes. Though the appendix isn't ornamental... But hair, nails, pierced nipples, all get used to express a style. In the same way as, in evolution, we have exaption: the repurposing of an obsolete function.

Dan, would you mind telling us how your work with JG Ballard intersects with that of skeuomorphs?

Sure. I see Ballard as the key author, philosopher even, of the age of technology. He's always managed to live five minutes into everyone else's futures, and has focused on the way our natural world has increasingly become a technologized domain we don't fully understand. So skeuomorphs, as a kind of 'memory' capacity of artefacts, can show us the processes that guide the evolution of the forms of technology. And I feel that Ballard affirms the moral necessity of this kind of understanding.

Does that suggest to you that we are already skeuomorphs? All, mind and body?

No, we're not. There are many linguistic skeuomorphs: take for example on line 'newspapers'. Which is more ...

Last Year at Marienbad is 50. awarded the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and nominated for an Oscar, but also branded an 'aimless disaster' by Pauline Kael; lauded by some as a great leap forward in the battle against linear storytelling and a worthy successor to Hoffmann, Proust, and Borges (Mubi Notebook)

On archaeology and the "philosophy of recording"Why do we choose to record the sites, monuments and artefacts that we do? Why do we select the units of information we choose to record about them? How have the things we record and the attributes recorded changed over time?

Japanese secret B-2 Stealth Bomber 1988 From Wikipedia (redacted):“From 1989 to 2004, the South Dakota Air and Space Museum located on the grounds of Ellsworth Air Force Base displayed the 10-short-ton ”Honda-Stealth”, a 60% scale mock-up of a stealthy bomber which had been built by Honda in 1988 for an advertising campaign.
Although not an actual replica of a B-2, the mock-up was close enough to the B-2’s design to arouse suspicion that Honda had intercepted classified, top secret information, as the B-2 project was still officially classified in 1988. Honda donated the model to the museum in 1989, on condition that the model be destroyed if it was ever replaced with a different example. In 2005, when the museum received a B-1 Lancer for display (Ellsworth being a ...